In 1960, when the computing industry was still struggling with what computer languages even were, McCarthy published his infamous paper discovering a formalism which became the guiding light for the next half century of computing.

Forty years later McCarthy published another paper with his incomplete vision for a language for 2015. Little did he know then that on the other side of the country Okasaki had just published the missing piece to his puzzle. In this talk we’ll complete the puzzle he left for us and find out if McCarthy really did end up inspiring the guiding lights for an entire century of computing history.

After doing so we’ll explore what these ideas would mean for computing. We’ll look at some projects, such as Unison, EClj, Oxcart and Kiss, which are building on this vision. Understand why Haskell is a mutable language. Explore how it will change our interactions with computers; how development, experimentation and deployment will change forever and finally how it ends up having a killer feature we wished we never needed.

Thanks to our sponsors

Conversational Computing: How Okasaki made McCarthy right yet again

Michiel has been building virtual interactions for several years as the technical founder of Interactly. He was once given near-impossible requirements and worked on them until he realised it would take a purely functional lisp to make it happen. Ever since Rich got tantalisingly close to scratching that itch he's been a proud Clojure evangelist working to turn those once impossible requirements into an everyday reality.

In 1960, when the computing industry was still struggling with what computer languages even were, McCarthy published his infamous paper discovering a formalism which became the guiding light for the next half century of computing.

Forty years later McCarthy published another paper with his incomplete vision for a language for 2015. Little did he know then that on the other side of the country Okasaki had just published the missing piece to his puzzle. In this talk we’ll complete the puzzle he left for us and find out if McCarthy really did end up inspiring the guiding lights for an entire century of computing history.

After doing so we’ll explore what these ideas would mean for computing. We’ll look at some projects, such as Unison, EClj, Oxcart and Kiss, which are building on this vision. Understand why Haskell is a mutable language. Explore how it will change our interactions with computers; how development, experimentation and deployment will change forever and finally how it ends up having a killer feature we wished we never needed.

Thanks to our sponsors

Conversational Computing: How Okasaki made McCarthy right yet again

Michiel has been building virtual interactions for several years as the technical founder of Interactly. He was once given near-impossible requirements and worked on them until he realised it would take a purely functional lisp to make it happen. Ever since Rich got tantalisingly close to scratching that itch he's been a proud Clojure evangelist working to turn those once impossible requirements into an everyday reality.